Andreas Marklund:
'The Marital Duty that a Husband owes his Wife.' Love, Masculinity and the Bed in Swedish Marriage Ideology, c. 1760-1835

The article probes the concept of love in Swedish marriage ideology during the decades around 1800. This conception was highly complex. Personal inclination was but one of many factors that brought about marital love and the matching of the spouses was a collective enterprise that followed certain written as well as unwritten rules. Throughout the entire period, the Swedish authorities expressed their disapproval of parents who forced their children into loveless marriages based on material considerations. Simultaneously, the authorities emphasised marital love as a duty. In the eighteenth century material, the duty of marital love was subjected to the Lutheran order of society, made up by the three analogous estates of the King, the Church and the Household. Two features characterize this conception of love. Firstly, it was highly corporal, based on steady intercourse in the conjugal bed. Secondly, the responsibility for marital love was attributed to the Lutheran Husband, i.e. the Master of the Household. In this ideology, marital love and marital coitus - the Marital Duty - functioned as political tools that solidified the Lutheran House and by extension the Swedish kingdom. By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, however, the language of love was sentimentalised and the compulsory character turned inwards: love became a duty to the sacralized synthesis of husband-wife-children. Moreover, the conjugal bed disappeared from public speech and the tasks of love were re-located from the husbandly mandate to the moral arsenal of the Compassionate Wife. This redefinition of marital love was connected to the development of a new household terminology with feminine connotations: a cult of domesticity which portrayed husbands and children as passive recipients of wifely benevolence.